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By failing to deal resolutely and forcefully with Teh ran’s nuclear ambitions, we’ve been sending a clear message to other rogue-nation nuclear wannabes that we don’t really care.

It brings to mind the “broken window” insight that helped spawn New York City’s policing revolution.

A window breaks in a vacant building — and no one fixes it. A week later, another one gets broken, then another. Garbage piles up in front of the door. As weeks go by, local hoodlums realize no one’s paying attention. Eventually, someone breaks through the front door; crack dealers move in, and squatters start fires inside. It’s become a community danger zone.

Now, our unfixed broken atomic “window” is about to spawn another.

Last week, the Obama administration woke up to the fact that Syria has been steadily working on a nuke-weapons program. It is considering asking the United Nations to investigate — even though Syrian dictator Bashar Assad has been blocking the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency from investigating suspected nuclear sites for years.

Sorry: It’s not the United Nations that holds the key to keeping Syria from becoming the next Iran. It’s the United States — and it’s time to realize American decline has consequences.

That Assad wants nukes should surprise no one. In 2007, Israeli jets pounded a site in Syria’s remote eastern desert where, it was thought, Assad’s scientists were working with North Korean help on making a bomb. Now, three years later, it seems Syria is getting the help it needs from its anti-Israel bedfellow Iran.

Assad has also picked up another powerful lesson from that rogue nation. If he wants to develop nuclear weapons to threaten Israel and dominate the region, the West will do nothing, or next to nothing, to stop him.

Ironically, just five years ago, Assad’s vicious, unpopular regime seemed on the ropes. It had been chased out of Lebanon by the democratic “Cedar Revolution” and stood in international disgrace for its links to the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. President George W. Bush had slapped firm sanctions on Damascus. Oil-poor compared to other regional powers such as Iraq or Iran, Syria looked isolated and vulnerable.

Then came President Obama to the rescue. The new president lifted many of the Bush-era sanctions and reopened our embassy in Damascus. In April, Obama’s emissary, Sen. John Kerry — believing mistakenly, as many on the establishment left do, that a US dialogue with Damascus would somehow help bring Israel to the Middle East peace table — had a warm meeting with the Syrian dictator.

But Assad’s eyes are focused on Iran, not on Kerry.

He’s seen that country become a regional power by supporting terror — even killing US soldiers in Iraq and giving Scud missiles to Hezbollah to aim at Israel — while the West did nothing.

He has seen that the best way to bolster a faltering dictatorship is to pursue a nuclear-weapons program, and that, while Russia and China will lie to the US about supporting sanctions against such a program, they’ll in fact conduct business as usual.

He also sees America as a country too focused on domestic problems to pay much attention to emerging threats abroad.

On Saturday, Assad will also see Russia start up Iran’s reactor at Bushehr, which can produce plutonium ready to be upgraded for weapons-grade use. Another benchmark will have been passed in America’s bumbling efforts to keep Iran from developing a nuclear bomb — and once again the West’s response will be too little, too late.

Meanwhile, Syria passes Iranian arms to Hamas and Hezbollah, even as Jordan and the Saudis mend diplomatic fences with Assad. At the same time, they’re also quietly exploring their own nuclear options.

The hard lesson is this: As long as US power looks impotent and America’s will to confront and deal with troublemakers recedes, we will encourage more predatory regimes like Iran and Syria and Venezuela — and encourage bigger powers like Russia and China to behave the same way. One broken window doesn’t stay the only one very long.

Arthur Herman, author of “Gandhi and Churchill,” is finish ing a book on the arsenal of de mocracy in World War II.